From 2005-2008, blacks/African Americans constituted the largest percentage of diagnoses of HIV infection each year. In 2008, of adults and adolescents diagnosed with HIV infection in the 37 states and 5 U.S. dependent areas with confidential name-based HIV infection reporting since at least January 2005, 50% were black/African American, 29% were white, 20% were Hispanic/Latino, 1% each were Asian and American Indian/Alaska Native and persons reporting multiple races, and less than 1% were Native Hawaiian/other Pacific Islander.

Nearly three in ten beneficiaries (29 percent) are limited in their ability to handle basic activities of daily living (ADLs), such as bathing and eating, with even higher shares among the nonelderly disabled population (42 percent) and those ages 85 and older (48 percent). A similar share of all beneficiaries (30 percent) are limited in their ability to do instrumental activities of daily living (IADLs), such as housework, preparing meals, and using the telephone. Such limitations affect a greater share of nonelderly disabled beneficiaries (54 percent) and those ages 85 and over (43 percent).

To experience self-stigma, the person must be aware of the stereotypes that describe a stigmatized group (e.g., people with mental illness are to blame for their disorder) and agree with them (that’s right, people with mental illness are actually to blame for their disorder).

The Labor Department’s most comprehensive alternative unemployment rate measure — which includes people who want to work but are discouraged from looking and people working part time because they can’t find full-time jobs — recorded its highest reading on record in data that go back to 1994. In September 2010, this rate jumped up to 17.1 percent.

Mean heart rate in the 6-second resting interval prior to script onset for control, circumscribed social phobia, generalized social phobia without comorbid depression, and generalized social phobia with comorbid depression groups. Error bars refer to standard error of the mean.

Recent data from the National Comorbidity Survey Replication study55, 57, a nationally representative epidemiological survey of mental disorders, suggest that about half of the population fulfill criteria for one or other psychiatric disorders in their lifetimes. The majority of those with a mental disorder have had the beginnings of the illness in childhood or adolescence. Some anxiety disorders such as phobias and separation anxiety and impulse-control disorders begin in childhood, while other anxiety disorders such as panic, generalized anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder, substance disorders and mood disorders begin later, with onsets rarely before early teens. Schizophrenia typically begins in late adolescence or the early twenties, with men having a somewhat earlier age of onset compared to women56. Psychiatric disorders with childhood or adolescent onsets tend to be more severe, are frequently undetected early in the illness, and accrue additional co-morbid disorders especially if untreated. It is therefore critical to focus efforts on early identification and intervention.

Technically, the recession that began in December 2007 ended in June 2009 as the economy began growing again. But, the pace of growth has not been strong enough to reduce the unemployment rate, which rose far higher than in the previous two recessions and far faster than (though not quite as high as) in the deep 1981-82 recession.

Cognitive appraisal of stigma-related stress and its predictors (part 1, adapted from Major and O’Brien, 2005). Stress predictors consist of public and personal factors (left margin of Figure 1). Ingroup perception (lower left corner of Figure 1) refers to how individuals with mental illness perceive their ingroup, that is the group of people with mental illness; more specifically, how individuals value their ingroup (group value), how strongly they feel attached to it (group identification) and whether they perceive their ingroup as a coherent unit in society (entitativity).

The red arrows represent continuity from early childhood to adulthood, and the blue arrows represent proposed causal pathways. As shown in the lower portion of the model, maternal depression is a well-known predictor of youth depression; depression during adolescence in turn predicts recurrence of depression in many youth and is hypothesized to predict becoming a depressed parent, especially in females. The upper portion of the model shows the intergenerational transmission of stress in families of depressed parents, from early childhood through the transition to adulthood. Stress and depression in the youth are reciprocally related. Interpersonal dysfunction in childhood is hypothesized to be a mediator of the link between both early stress exposure and maternal depression and the two outcomes of adolescent stress and depression.